“The Liberal Imagination” was a Cold War book. It did something that very few books have ever done: it made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics.
Still, “The Liberal Imagination” was a phenomenon. Trilling had taught at Columbia since 1932 he was a regular contributor to the Times and The New Yorker. A novel, “The Middle of the Journey,” appeared in 1947 it had a less happy reception and disappointing sales, but it was widely noticed. Forster, in 1943, was the occasion for a seven-page article in Time. “He seemed intent on not diminishing his career by a single word.” Trilling’s doctoral dissertation, on Matthew Arnold, had been published in 1939 and reviewed with approval by Edmund Wilson and Robert Penn Warren. “With the deep-sunk colored pouches under his eyes, the cigarette always in hand like an intellectual gesture, an air that combined weariness, vanity, and immense caution, he was already a personage,” Alfred Kazin wrote about meeting Trilling for the first time, in 1942. Trilling was forty-four when “The Liberal Imagination” came out, and he had already acquired a mystique among literary intellectuals.
It was the price he paid for a small but subtle and distinctive body of criticism. A lot of psychic energy went into the care and maintenance of this persona. He wanted to feel superior without betraying to others his sense of superiority.
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The sense that I fall between the two categories, of the academic and the man of genius & real originality, but better to make a full attempt toward “genius.”-To learn to make no concessions of a personal social kind toward the academic, but also not to signalize in a personal way my separation from it. But I must in all things declare myself and go on being “brilliant,” and wrong if necessary, extreme. He registered his reaction in the journal:įeeling of total alienation from the academic profession and that I must not any more identify myself with it at such occasions. Around the time “The Liberal Imagination” was published, he gave an enthusiastically received lecture at Princeton. But he resented being understood under the aspect of anything so insufficiently nuanced as a category. He was all of those things, of course he would never have denied it. This meant cultivating a discreet distance from any group with which he might be too quickly identified-professors, public intellectuals, liberals, Jews. He wished that he had been called John or Jack.īut although he may not have wanted what he had, and he may not have understood entirely why he had it, he appreciated its value and tended it with care. He was depressive, he had writer’s block, and he drank too much. His ambition was to be a great novelist he regarded his criticism as “an afterthought.” He disliked Columbia he disliked most of his colleagues he disliked teaching graduate students-in 1952, after a routine disagreement over the merits of a dissertation, he refused to teach in the graduate school again. He did not consider himself a critic, either, and was surprised when he heard himself referred to as one. In 1955, he complained to his analyst about “the effect on my emotional and sexual life of my sense of my prestige” and “my feeling of disgust with my public ‘noble’ character.” He became a University Professor at Columbia, but he did not consider himself a scholar: he had no languages except English and he didn’t see the point of the systematic study of literature. He hated being regarded as a paragon of anything. “It is the thing I have most wanted from childhood-although of course in much greater degree-and now that I seem to have it I have no understanding whatever of its basis-of what it is that makes people respond to what I say, for I think of it as of a simplicity and of a naivety almost extreme.” “I hear on all sides of the extent of my reputation-which some even call ‘fame,’ ” he wrote in the journal.
He represented, for many people, the life of the mind. “This thought makes me retch.” Two years later, he published “The Liberal Imagination,” a book that sold more than seventy thousand copies in hardcover and more than a hundred thousand in paperback, and that made Trilling a figure, a model of the intellectual in Cold War America.
“I have one of the great reputations in the academic world,” he wrote in his journal after being promoted to full professor in the Columbia English Department, in 1948. Lionel Trilling was not completely happy about being Lionel Trilling.